Posted my review of Comedy Central Salutes George W. Bush. On Friday I signed up with a website called PubMatic, which is supposed to help optimize which advertisements are shown on the site in order to get me the most money. Hopefully it will work good enough so that I can actually remove an ad or two, but I'm not going to hold my breath. Anyway, it's picking various color combinations for the ads to see which ones perform better, so be prepared to see some weird colors before it finally has enough data to settle on a decent color scheme. Dang site, why'd it have to become so popular?!

My chair, a glider recliner with glider ottoman in microfiber midnight black broke today. Actually, it was just one screw that snapped, but it was an important screw. Fortunately, I have a backup screw... unfortunately, I cannot get the second half of the old screw out of the hole. I'll probably try drilling it out tomorrow, as it be a shame to waste a perfectly good chair just because of one stupid screw.

My wife and I are back from our one week vacation to Lake Tahoe! Actually, we've been back for like a week now, as we left on September 26th and got back October 4th. We went with my parents, and it was a great trip, very different than most vacations we take. Usually we end up going out each and every day to see sights and partake in activities, but this time we really only went out every other day, so we actually got a lot of time to just lay back and relax. It's easy to forget that this is an important part of taking a vacation.

You may notice that I've posted a lot of DVD reviews recently, and not a whole lot of anime updates. This has a lot to do with all the free time we had just chilling in front of the television, as well as the convenience and availability of my wife's laptop for writing up some first draft reviews at night after everyone else was settling into bed. And I'm truly glad they had a DVD player also because they sure didn't have that many channels. Maybe like around 20-30 all together, and a bunch were in various states of static.

We were able to get wireless internet where we were staying, but even so I still choose not to check my e-mail for the entire time we were there. I was on vacation after all! Of course, that meant I had a ton of it when we finally got home. What's worse is that I was already backed up with e-mails before we left. If you sent me a message and haven't heard back yet, I'm terribly sorry! I will definitely read every message eventually, but I'm pretty confident that there's no way I can reply to every single one. If your message requires a response, then I'll hit you back, otherwise just know that I either have or will at some point read your message, so thank you for sending it.

Once we were back at the house, we soon realized that something was wrong with our television programming, as some of the shows TiVo tried to record actually turned out to be shows on a different channel, or of a black screen saying we didn't receive the channel. After a few days, we figured out that certain channels would be dropped from our DirecTV lineup, only to reappear later on. I called DirecTV's tech support, and we went through and tried a bunch of stuff to fix it, but nothing worked. Then I was told the next step would be to send a tech person out, for which I would need to cough up $70....

Wait a sec... so you want me pay a bunch of money to have someone come over to the house and find a way to get the channels that I am already paying for but not receiving? How does that make sense? Shouldn't you be refunding me money because I'm not getting what I'm paying for? So I said "no thanks, I'll just switch to cable". She then said she could waive the $70 fee if I subscribed to some kind of protection plan for $5.99 a month. Uh... again, that'd be me paying more money just to ensure I'm getting what I'm paying for. No thank you.

Thus, we signed up for Charter cable a couple days ago. We did one of those package deals where it's cheap for six months and then the price gets jacked up, so we'll be saving some dough for a little while. After the six-months is up, the price is still about the same as what we were paying for DirecTV, so that's fine, though I'll probably call and see if I can't negotiate a better price. Anyway, the installer should be here tomorrow sometime between 1-3 to get everything set up, and since the house is already wired for cable, I don't expect it will take much doing.